One Fun Way Microsoft Cripples Your PC
April 28th, 2009No Wonder Apple is Doing Well
My computer has been driving me nuts. It used to boot in 30 seconds, and now it takes all day. I found one of the reasons, and I thought I’d share it with you.
Windows XP has a feature called “search indexing” or something similar. It makes your computer root through its hard drive all day, looking for stuff and recording in it in order to make searches faster.
I am finally ready to assert, without reservation, that Microsoft’s people are hopelessly incompetent. I used to think the bizarre problems with their products had to be justified by considerations lay people can’t understand, but that’s not true. These people are just second-rate. The search thing is proof. No one in his right mind would put a thing like this in an operating system. How many times per week do you search your computer? I probably do it twice. If it’s slow, I don’t care. What I do care about is having my CPU run at 99% for half an hour, slowing everything to a crawl, so searches will be faster. It’s just plain stupid. You don’t have to be a computer whiz to realize how dumb this is. It’s like paying a maid to dust your entire house five times a day. The benefit can’t begin to measure up to the cost.
The thing that really used to make me question their ability was the unbelievably bad and unreliable networking software, coupled with help files so weak it is completely pointless to try to use them. But this is even dumber. It’s like something GM or Chrysler would do. The people at Apple are bumblers of the first order, but they can’t top this.
Well, maybe they can. I’m sure an angry Mac user will chime in. They exist. The Kool-Aid doesn’t work on everyone.
If you open the “Run” window and type “services.msc” and hit the Enter key, you’ll get a long list of things your computer does without asking you. Go down to the search indexing entry, stop it, and disable it. Your computer will run like Bill Gates chasing somebody else’s money.
I wish I had Windows 3.1. It was much better.
April 28th, 2009 at 11:48 AM
You can uninstall that “feature.” You probably installed when running the Windows updates. It’s called “Windows Search 4.0 for Windows XP.”
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Go to your Control Panel then to Add or Remove Programs. Make sure you have a check in the box at the top for “Show Updates.” Scroll down until you find “Windows Search 4.0 for Windows XP (KB940157)” and remove it.
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Now your computer will run a bit faster.
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I think that “feature” was Microsoft’s lame attempt at copying Apple’s “Spotlight” search function.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:33 PM
I have recently upgraded an older mac with a newer OS, 10.4.x I believe. This OS does the same thing, and since it was an older machine, the indexing made it unusable. So I disabled the indexing.
Then I found out that the search will not work at all, even for filenames.
But it does not tell you that, you just get the never-ending rainbow wheel of death.
I had to add third party software just to find filenames.
So it isn’t just MS, Apple is just as bad in this specific example.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:39 PM
Heh heh heh. Schandenfreude deluxe! I’ll be there to help when you finally buy a Mac, brother!
April 28th, 2009 at 12:51 PM
TC: Spotlight came after MS put indexing in Windows, in fact – by about five years.
And it comes with Win2k, XP and Vista – Windows Search 4.0 is just an update to the indexing service, that adds a Lot Of Capabilities that… nobody uses at home.
On the other hand, it also shouldn’t be any slower than the default indexing, either.
(It seems odd that indexing would affect boot times – it doesn’t build an index at boot; it caches it, because the people at MS aren’t that stupid. XP can boot slowly for all sorts of reasons, but indexing causes it to run slow, not boot slow.
You might try here for ideas about what might be slowing it down.
I recently worked on a friend’s computer that was taking forever to boot… because it had 512 megs of ram and was trying to start Acrobat and Office at boot.)
April 28th, 2009 at 2:47 PM
I search files on my work machine constantly. Well, on a near-daily basis, anyway, but it’s probably a fairly atypical case, since it actually relates to my job.
Even then, though, I don’t let the indexer run.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:09 PM
Steve…feel fortunate you have Windows XP…
The machine I’m writing this comment on has VISTA Home edition because it’s the only thing the on-line HP Store would sell me when I bought it, and it has to “recover from an unexpected shutdown” at least once every twenty-four hours…sometimes two or three times in the same period if I’m watching TV on my TV card and have AutoCAD and Photoshop and multiple browser sessions open.
I bought a legal OEM copy of XP professional from E-Bay to install on an old laptop which had crashed and still have a legal installation available for this machine but I hate the thought of having to re-install everything–a zillion giggabytes–from a back-up copy or a download.
XP Professional is miles ahead of what I’m running on this machine now in my opinion–and I have a copy of XP Media Center on another 17″ HP Laptop and it rarely crashes either.
I’ve used MS DOS since 1983/84 starting with DOS 1.0 and endured windows since the ’95 edition and I personally believe that Mr. Gates et.al. have always sold Alpha/Beta quality software to unsuspecting technically incompetent yet well intended consumers with criminal disregard for the functionallity of the product at hand while offering the carrot of a “new and improved” fix almost as soon as you turn on the power switch and hit the enter key.
The free download “patches” rarely offest the fundamental “upgrades” offered for a price within three months to one year of hitting the “big red switch.”
I gave up my subscription to Byte Magazine years after my subscription to MAD magazine, but Seattle’s reversion to calling their latest product “Window’s 7” instead of Vista 2.0 or Vista II
( http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=windows&articleId=9132211&taxonomyId=125&intsrc=kc_feat )
provides proof of their own recognition of the quality of the crap they forced on unsuspecting new computer buyers.
Still, I love my evolutionary offspring of my original old IBM PC
and manage to keep making money using a mouse with an Intel chip providing the horsepower…knowing that there’s a “C:prompt” hiding in there somewhere inside the metaL/plastic cabinet…
April 28th, 2009 at 3:51 PM
From what I understand, Apple also keeps an index. But every time you move/delete/create a file, it just marks it down in the index.
Instead of waiting to do a full scan like Microsoft does.
MS at one point was claiming that they’d put all this stuff in a Database.That concept quietly went away.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:55 PM
“I think that “feature” was Microsoft’s lame attempt at copying Apple’s “Spotlight” search function.”
How long will it take for Windoze to stop emulating everything Apple does and start innovating? Don’t hold your hard drive waiting.
Balmer will tell you what Microsoft is all about and it’s not about users. It’s about developers, developers, developers, developers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPRry0Tq1jk&feature=related
April 28th, 2009 at 4:11 PM
I have been using an Imac at work from time to time. it’s got a real processor (intel) and a decent kernel (Mach-unix) so it is dependable and has low overhead. If they ported some decent software for it i’d switch in a minute. if you’re not doing any hard engineering this is a fine computer. And the 20″ version starts around a grand.
Might just have to build a hackintosh just to see how well it will work.
April 28th, 2009 at 4:55 PM
I just asked my network admin about it (yeah, I’m reading this at work – don’t tell anyone). He was thinking you might have Google toobar installed, which does have search indexing.
April 28th, 2009 at 5:49 PM
It isn’t just Microsoft. Linux also has several indexers available, and they do exactly the same thing – slow the system down to a crawl. The most common one is called “Beagle,” and there are lots of Linux users out there who have happily shot that dog.
I’m fairly certain that Mac has a similar feature.
The problem they’re trying to solve is: how do you quickly find things on today’s enormous and increasingly larger hard drives? A spontaneous, linear search can take hours on a terabyte drive. So you index as you go along, then search the index.
If you don’t spend a lot of time rummaging through your hard drive’s contents, you don’t need it. I shot the Beagle long ago, and have never missed it. But I tend to know where everything I need to lay hands on is already; on the rare occasions I don’t, the wait doesn’t bother me.
April 28th, 2009 at 6:02 PM
“It seems odd that indexing would affect boot times – it doesn’t build an index at boot; it caches it, because the people at MS aren’t that stupid.”
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Actually, it does build the index at boot, and they are that stupid.
April 28th, 2009 at 9:41 PM
My Mac and its search engine work flawlessly. As a matter of fact, Spotlight, and its application variants, are so good at what they do, Microsoft copied the concept for Vista. Unfortunately, MS’s solution blows. And I know it does because I have to use a Vista machine at work: it is pure unadulterated crap.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:14 AM
Iman, I am sure the Algore is smiling on your choice of PC.
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By the way, how is David Bowie?
April 30th, 2009 at 2:39 AM
I just gave up and installed ubuntu linux. it slick and quick and uses weird terminology.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:07 PM
I still miss windows 3.1, but in today’s world, you’d need… I think it was 3.11, called windows for workgroups. Better networking.
April 30th, 2009 at 10:01 PM
WFW and NT 4 were the only good versions of Windows ever.